Up to now, a variety of technologies relating to signal compression and recovery have been suggested and are generally applied to a variety of data including an audio signal and a video signal. The signal compression and recovery technologies have been developed while improving image quality and sound quality as well as increasing a compression rate. In order to adapt to a variety of communication environments, efforts for increasing transmission efficiency have been in progress.
Typically, media contents including an audio signal, a video signal and additional information have been provided from a content provider to an end user via dedicated means such as a cable.
Recently, as the use of the Internet have increased dramatically and a requirement for an Internet protocol (IP) based service has increased, efforts for providing the IP-based service have been actively in progress. In addition, a digital convergence technology has been rapidly developed in view of a combination of the Internet and television.
However, since a method of processing data in the IP based service was not suggested, many problems may be caused in providing a service for efficiently encoding data, transmitting the encoded data and decoding the transmitted data using an IP based network.